The doctrine that the stuff of the world is fundamentally mind-stuff goes by the name of panpsychism. A few decades ago, the American philosopher Thomas Nagel showed that it is an inescapable consequence of some quite reasonable premises. First, our brains consist of material particles. Second, these particles, in certain arrangements, produce subjective thoughts and feelings. Third, physical properties alone cannot account for subjectivity. (How could the ineffable experience of tasting a strawberry ever arise from the equations of physics?) Now, Nagel reasoned, the properties of a complex system like the brain don’t just pop into existence from nowhere; they must derive from the properties of that system’s ultimate constituents. Those ultimate constituents must therefore have subjective features themselves — features that, in the right combinations, add up to our inner thoughts and feelings. But the electrons, protons and neutrons making up our brains are no different from those making up the rest of the world. So the entire universe must consist of little bits of consciousness.
Nagel himself stopped short of embracing panpsychism, but today it is enjoying something of a vogue. The Australian philosopher David Chalmers and the Oxford physicist Roger Penrose have spoken on its behalf. In the recent book “Consciousness and Its Place in Nature,” the British philosopher Galen Strawson defends panpsychism against numerous critics....
Take that rock over there. It doesn’t seem to be doing much of anything, at least to our gross perception. But at the microlevel it consists of an unimaginable number of atoms connected by springy chemical bonds, all jiggling around at a rate that even our fastest supercomputer might envy. And they are not jiggling at random. The rock’s innards “see” the entire universe by means of the gravitational and electromagnetic signals it is continuously receiving. Such a system can be viewed as an all-purpose information processor, one whose inner dynamics mirror any sequence of mental states that our brains might run through. And where there is information, says panpsychism, there is consciousness. In David Chalmers’s slogan, “Experience is information from the inside; physics is information from the outside.”Quantum Activist
The Mind of a Rock
Jim Holt | New York Times
5 comments:
"Panpsychism" as supported by Penrose in the Hameroff-Penrose model departs from the hypothesis that human subjectivity, feelings, consciousness correlates with quantum coherence states in neuronal tubulines.
In this sense, the ineffable experience of tasting a strawberry could arise from the equations of physics. Experience happens when quantum coherent states modulation in a brain happen.
This does not deny that "matter" can have some form of "feeling", but quantum coherent states as hypothesized by Hameroff and Penrose are of such extension and complexity that it does not seem that they can exist outside human brains or other more powerful brains that may exist.
Human perception must be orders of magnitude more complex than say the perception of a rock - Hameroff takes in special the case of a plant.
Incidentally, the hypothesis also denies the possibility that conventional electronic computers can become "conscious" or have "feelings", no matter how intelligent is the software they run - the central argument of Penrose in the Preface of the Emperor's New Mind.
I think that the take-away from this is that in the Information Age, the cultural paradigm will shift from matter and energy toward information.
The paradigm of perennial wisdom, there are three nested "worlds," the gross world of matter, the subtle world or energy, although not physical energy but vital energy, and mind. These three relative changing worlds are different levels of manifestation of infinite consciousness aka the absolute.
This age-old paradigm has already been imported into transpersonal psychology, and thinkers in other fields are working on it also although there is more resistance in other fields in terms of hewing the existing paradigms including the dominant Western cultural paradigm in which they are nested. Other cultural paradigms that are pantheistic or panentheistic are more open to panpsychism than the West, and some are founded on it. It's not unusual to find Indian scientists saying, "Of course."
Interestingly, Kenneth Boulding brought this type of thinking into economics via general systems theory, of which he was a co-founders. He held that while the old paradigm of economics treats the fundamental factors as capital, land and labor, new thinking calls for seeing economics in terms of material, energy and information, where information is of predominant importance, like capital in the old way of thinking. See, for instance, his short paper, The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth (1966). Incidentally, Randy Wray is familiar with Boulding and written about his work.
" atoms connected by springy chemical bonds, all jiggling around ..... And they are not jiggling at random."
More "jiggling" here... and then you have Hamilton: "oh the copious flows!..."
Of course I cant prove this, but I have a hunch that the 3 precious metals, gold/silver/copper,
(btw that solely comprise Column 11 of the Periodic Table and are the only metals to also have full d-band electron states (UNIQUE!)
are transmitting some sort of EM signal into the brains of the metal lovers that creates some perverse form of pleasure and hence their basic desire for these metals over humans... (sick! twisted mf-ers...)
Stimulates seratonin or something affecting their "Pleasure Centers" or whatever:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleasure_center
And Ignacio has the data on how then the neocortex can just shutdown for certain people when faced with "fight or flight" when you confront them on this as a fellow human...
They're basically "brain damaged"...
rsp,
I agree that it's hard to see how materialism could account for consciousness, but what's the positive argument for panpsychism? Is there any reason to suppose that the bowl of soup that I'm eating, the dishcloth in my sink, the pebbles in my yard, are conscious and alive? They seem to be inert, dead things to me.
vimothy, here is where perennial wisdom comes in.
First there is the testimony of those who plausibly may be in a position to know. There are voluminous report from people that humanity has accepted as its teachers in all cultures. It would be implausible to reject all this testimony as deception, self-deception, or hallucination. So-called spiritual experience is a rich set of phenomena calling for explanation.
Secondly, perennial wisdom also provides conceptual models that explain it and also predict the outcome of following it. Many of those who follow the methods report similar cognitive-affective phenomena. However, admittedly this doesn't necessary imply that the phenomena have ontological import. But there have been experiments that suggest this may so, that is, "mind over matter."
So there is also the methodology of verification through experience that the sages set forth. Many of those who follow the methodology report landmark experiences and researchhave reported unique physiological phenomena associated with the reports. For example, some of the transpersonal psychologists investigating the phenomena reported in perennial wisdom decided to undertake the experiment in the laboratory of their own minds and lives, and they have reported confirmatory results, e.g. Charles Tart and Ken Wilber, both of whom got involved in Buddhist practice, Robert Frager through Sufism, and Richard Alpert through Vedanta. They and others have reported similarly positive results. There's a growing body of experimental research on this now, and it is hardly controversial anymore.
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